{"id":8796,"date":"2017-02-27T17:37:17","date_gmt":"2017-02-28T01:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leannechristie.com\/deathmask\/?p=8796"},"modified":"2023-10-19T01:05:32","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T01:05:32","slug":"forum-on-people-of-african-descent-un-international-decade-for-people-of-african-descent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leannemchristie.com\/forum-on-people-of-african-descent-un-international-decade-for-people-of-african-descent\/","title":{"rendered":"Forum on People of African Descent, UN International Decade for people of African Descent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So up next we have another artist here, Leanne Christie. She\u2019s a painter and her production is of Death Masks: the Vancouver Viaducts and Complexity.<\/p>\n
So with this Miss Christie if you want to come up here and show us more about your work and we are very happy to have you here with us today. Folks you are in store for another set of fantastic renditions from this wonderful artist.<\/p>\n
So good afternoon everybody, I believe that I\u2019ve got I think a 2-hour slot. I\u2019ve got my notes over here ready to go. So thank you very much, it is nice to see everybody and I am very very excited about introducing this work to you.<\/p>\n
I will go into various steps of my process in terms of thinking about the pieces and actually explain why I called this series Death Mask.<\/p>\n
But for now, I think that the best thing to start with is to show you .. each painting and there are currently 3 pieces on display at the moment \u2013 the one at the end is not a completed piece, we are probably about 60\/70% there, there is still a bit of dialogue that needs to happen with it.<\/p>\n
There is a piece missing which is the second piece but each painting so far minus the one on the end which is obviously still in process, has got a video that accompanies it because the whole point with painting is to have it as a form of communication, not to alienate people so part of my video process is to add another layer of storytelling to it.<\/p>\n
So I am going to start off just by showing you the first video that goes with this middle painting over here and then we can get onto the little chain of thought that leads through the paintings and hopefully at the end it will make sense as to why we\u2019ve torn the piece.[\/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cgI_m1nO8-Y”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n
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So, everybody has got a story about the Viaducts and this is one of the reasons why it makes sense as a particular topic for this series of paintings.<\/p>\n
Your passage of relationship comes from your experiences and your input that you have through shared community experiences and individual experiences.<\/p>\n
What are the Viaducts?<\/p>\n
They have been so many things they are the political manifestations, they\u2019re the cultural, social, racial, economic, urban dreams that are actually there as part of our landscape. In many ways, I am from South Africa and we were so surrounded by so many political monuments for such a long period of time, every time a political monument was toppled it was something meaningful and with the Viaducts, it is the only political monument that I can see in Vancouver.<\/p>\n
My passage into exploring the Viaducts is through complexity.<\/p>\n
One of the things that I think about as an urban painter, as an urban oil painter are the spaces that I enjoy painting within the city.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s interesting about the spaces that I want to linger in, what\u2019s interesting about the spaces that I actually want to encapture? what is it that excites my imagination, excites my emotion, excites my creativity? What is it that excites the people around me? And what is it about the spaces that I can\u2019t wait to leave, the spaces that leave me feeling with the sense of disease, that I actually want to exit from?<\/p>\n
And one of the things that I have realized about the spaces that engage me, these are the spaces that are filled with complexity, and in looking at complexity, one of the things that I have started to realize about complexity is that complexity comes from a layering of time and a layering of experiences or relationship.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the relationship that we have with each other within those spaces and it\u2019s also our relationship that we have with the natural physical environment around us. So we, looking at complexity, looking at my urban environment, thinking about the Viaducts and trying to understand \u201cwell fair enough what does this mean to you as a painter?\u201d I started thinking about how to develop complexity into the work itself because if that\u2019s the magic ingredient that excites our humanity, excites our engagement, excites our visions for the future.<\/p>\n
How do I instill complexity into a painting?<\/p>\n
And one of the things that I have had a look at because complexity is basically, as I have been trying to understand and explain in the video: it\u2019s time + relationships. It\u2019s giving people a canvas, creating a safe space so that time can act and then relationships can act to create a new space that describes our community and our culture.<\/p>\n
So looking at time within a painting, ah this is great because I am actually an oil painter and oil paint is the perfect vehicle to infuse time into the painting. Sure we can slow down the entire process and oil takes a very long time to dry so you really are able to slow down the process and nurture out the character of the painting but more than that, more than slowing it down and making it into another technique we come back to the truth about complexity and thinking about, for example a vintner He spends time actually infusing time as an ingredient into his wine to bring out the depth of flavour, to bring out the clarity, to bring out character into his wines.<\/p>\n
You look at a chef who will also use time as an actual ingredient in the cooking process to bring out the personality to the food that he is producing for you. So in thinking about that, I was looking at my materials and trying to understand how \u2013 yes I\u2019ve got pigments, I\u2019ve got other aspects. I\u2019ve got paint brushstrokes, I\u2019ve got perspective, there are so many tools that you have as a painter but how do you actually then start harnessing the power of time, infusing it into a painting in such a way that it acts on the painting in the same way that a vintner or a chef acts upon a painting.<\/p>\n
So that brought me back to the Viaducts, this big long.. \u201cgreat I am getting a little further along in complexity and understanding why it\u2019s important to develop complexity for human beings but then I am again looking at these Viaducts and trying to understand why I should bring complexity into the Viaducts\u201d and the reason is \u2013 because the Viaducts are so complex. For every single person in this room, each person has their unique experience and their own personal view of the future plans for the Viaducts. But then I was trying to think \u201cWhat is complexity? What is the difference between complex and complicated?\u201d<\/p>\n
And in looking at complexity (never google complexity, it will take you hours and hours, in fact I think that it will probably take years of your life to get to the bottom of complexity because every single field seems to have their own analyses of complexity and it\u2019s a huge topic) So what I have done is I have just taken it and boiled it down to the most basic element: Complexity being a system which is made up of individual parts which have individual relationships acting upon the other parts within the system.<\/p>\n
So what does complexity mean? Basically means that you take away one of these parts, the system will break but it is practically impossible to figure out what broke the system and how to redeem the system and how to remedy the system because it is far too complex, the way that the relationships all interact.<\/p>\n
Which is very different to complicated.<\/p>\n
Complicated becomes complicated and you can go very far down that road but at the end of the day there is a linear relationship that happens between all of the parts in the system and it is fairly easy, depending on how complicated it is to understand what broke and to fix what actually broke within the system.<\/p>\n
So coming back to this body of works, Why have I called it DeathMask?<\/p>\n
Looking at complexity: perfect vehicle for exploring complexity.<\/p>\n
Time: Perfect vehicle to explore time.<\/p>\n
But what is important about a death mask is that a deathmask (again in different cultures, at various times has different meanings) but when I have approached Deathmask I have looked at it from the aspect of an actual deathmask which is created as a clay impression of someone\u2019s face at the moment of passing or shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n
The Vancouver Viaducts are in their final throws, they are dying and this is the only moment that I will have as a painter to throw my \u2018clay\u2019 onto them and capture something of what it feels for us as human beings, living alongside these structures.<\/p>\n
Who were they?<\/p>\n
What are they?<\/p>\n
At sometimes they have been murders and at other times they have been a bully, at sometimes they have been protectors and at sometimes they have been communist, some times they have been capitalists, sometimes they have been a friend and sometimes they have been a foe and sometimes they have been orphans.<\/p>\n
So to capture these dying throws that we can only now experience of this deathmask. What did it mean to the past, what does it mean to the present and what is it bringing into the future?<\/p>\n
With the DeathMask I am not the person who is going to stand up here and give you a critique on the city\u2019s plans on what they intend to do with the Viaducts. I have read all the plans but I am not specialized enough nor educated enough to actually give any kind of critique on this. That is not what I am doing with this series. I don\u2019t have an agenda with this series. All I am doing is as a human being trying to understand how complexity can be brought into a painting through capturing what it is about these structures, these monuments which we have, the great canyon that exists within our city.<\/p>\n
What does it mean, what does it feel to actually be living here alongside them?<\/p>\n
So looking at these paintings, the first one over here: we have got time infused into this painting. With this piece (I am going to step away from the microphone and quickly point out something) These areas over here, when you come into this painting you will notice that there are some areas which are very densely built up and other areas where you can actually see the canvas and as you probably saw in the video, at various points in the painting I intentionally \u2013 and even when the painting was at a point where you could put a lovely tick after it , the painting didn\u2019t have the secret ingredient of complexity, time hadn\u2019t acted upon it \u2013 so what I did is that I intentionally built up the piece and then broke it down again.<\/p>\n